Linda Morrison, public policy consultant and policy coordinator for the Pennsylvania Chapter of Republicans for Environmental Protection, writes in with the following:
 

It's true that sometimes cities are their own worst enemies, pushing taxpaying residents and businesses out to the sprawling suburbs, but not all their problems are of their own making.

Proponents of sprawl say it is simply the result of consumer preference, free market forces and progress, but they ignore the invisible 800-pound government gorilla in the taxpayer-financed room. For decades, cities have been playing against a stacked deck, and usually, they don't even know it.

Just one example: I'd thought that government redlining of cities ended when Fannie Mae changed its mortgage lending policies more than three decades ago—but the same anti-urban principles are still in play when the government subsidizes businesses.

Four recent studies of policies in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and the Chicago region [all PDF links] have uncovered data generally unavailable to the public and rarely discussed. All show a reverse Robin Hood effect, as government business subsidies are geographically biased against the older, lower income, urban areas most in need of new jobs and reinvestment, and favor suburban locations. In many cases, government tax dollars are actually used to pay businesses to leave cities and their transit-dependent, low-income workers for higher income suburbs only accessible by car.

Besides the unfair bias against cities, these anti-city, suburban subsidies counteract hundreds of millions of dollars the same government is spending on popular anti-sprawl policies like environmental protection, farmland preservation, and city revitalization.

The left hand of government is doing the opposite of the right hand – and they don't even know it!

 
Morrison expands on these points in a Philadelphia Inquirer oped about a new “economic development” initiative in the Philadelphia that's can be found here.